I’ve been toying with the idea of writing another homebrew DS game using the libraries I developed for Hanky Alien. Unfortunately the existing code has one considerable flaw: the game logic is intimately entwined with the rendering system, to the point that writing a new game unavoidably involves rewriting a bunch of graphics code that really should have been separate.

To fix this I’ve pulled apart Hanky Alien and reassembled it into three distinct pieces:

A layering library that handles all of the rect stuff I insist on using instead of just writing a sprite simulator for SDL like any sensible person;

The game logic is currently included in the same build target as its presentation layer, but those can be trivially separated once I get around to it.

The new structure has a multitude of benefits. In order to place text on the screen, the code no longer needs to figure out where the text will go, figure out if it needs to erase what was previously at those co-ordinates, and then render the text; it just updates the string in a label view and lets the underlying libraries do all of the hard work. There’s a complete separation between the game logic and all I/O. Timer events piped down from the controller kick the game’s update logic, and game events (such as movement, or the addition or removal of objects within the game) are sent up to the controller via delegate callbacks. The controller is responsible for creating, moving, updating and removing views. I can change the game logic without having to think about any rendering. Each scene in the game - the “Simian Zombie” scene, the title scene, and the game scene itself - are all separate controllers. The GUI framework handles animating the transition from one controller to the next, which means a bunch of complex custom state machine logic became redundant. On top of that, the whole shebang is written in pure C.

All of this structure came with a horrible cost, however. Performance was nowhere near acceptable.

One huge benefit of manually managing the layout and redraw of the screen means each situation can be as efficient as possible. A generic approach to updating the framebuffer means there’s no opportunity for taking shortcuts that make sense in one place but would break other code. This forced me to dig through the entire codebase and try to optimize everything.

First step: profiling with Instruments. Hanky Alien builds happily using SDL2, so I can profile it on my Mac. It doesn’t necessarily give me accurate information, obviously; the Mac and DS have wildly different architectures and capabilities. It does give me a starting point, though.

One mistake that quickly became apparent was the amount of boxing and unboxing of rect structs that the layering library was performing. Subtracting one rectangle from another produces an array of leftover rectangles, and those were returned in an array. The array provided by the core library would only store objects, so I’d opted for the naive approach of boxing the leftover rect structs into value objects and sticking those in an array. Unfortunately each boxing operation required a malloc(), and any attempt at using the data in the objects required them to be unboxed back into structs first. The fix for this was easy: create a new array class specifically for storing collections of rect structs. As long as a resize isn’t required - which inevitably demands a realloc() call - appending rects involves nothing more than changing an int and copying a struct.

Creating those arrays was also slow, particularly when multiple rectangles are divided in a tight loop. The code used to look something like this:

The “remove all” function just sets the array’s size property to 0. We create a single static array and re-use it in each call of the function and each iteration of the loop. We can get away with this because all of the code is single-threaded.

I’ve been unrolling loops. The code above does a bunch of work in the loop that we could unroll. We can move the variable declarations out of the loop and stop querying the array length on each iteration:

The game logic itself had some inefficiencies. Something I’d annotated with a “todo” in the original game was the alien collision code. In order to check if the player’s bullets were colliding with an alien, the code looped over all aliens in the game. The new version treats each column of aliens as a unit and checks collisions with those before checking against the aliens themselves.

The code uses a huge number of rect calculations, so those needed to be as fast as possible. All of the functions had code to cater for rects with a negative width or height. That would never be possible with the data coming out of the various libraries, so I added a bunch of “fast” versions that didn’t do any sanity checking.

The rendering code now uses Cearn’s ARM assembly copy functions for blitting stuff to the framebuffer.

The code is much, much faster than it used to be, but it’s not enough to throw around as many bullets as the older version.

Some of the exciting failures were:

Flattening the view hierarchy into a single view and manually handling a bunch of the redrawing logic. Initially it seemed like this would lead to a massive speed boost, but as the redrawing code got more and more complex the game got slower and slower.

Replacing bitmaps with solid blocks of color to see if the DMA would help.

Using quadtrees to help partition the space and reduce the amount of collision detection being done.

Creating my own profiler to record the execution time of various functions.

My final idea was to ditch the DS completely and switch platforms to something with more CPU power. Requirements for the new platform:

Must be a console or handheld (rules out anything with a keyboard or without a joypad).

An easily-installed homebrew dev kit with great C support (rules out pretty much everything prior to 32 bit).

A faster CPU than the DS’ 66MHz ARM9 (no GBA).

No fighting firmware upgrades (so long, Vita/3DS/Wii U).

Well-designed input devices (no GPH devices).

Must be easy to test on the real device.

Must have a reasonably capable OSX emulator.

By my estimation, that leaves three potential devices: the PSP, the Wii, and the Dreamcast. I’ve had a look at the dev kits for the PSP and Wii and neither one really seemed to fit with the archaic software rendering that I’m trying to do. The Dreamcast, though, appears to have a wonderfully simplistic framebuffer graphics mode and even supports DS-style RGB555-encoded pixel data. It could use some more homebrew.

One trip to Amazon later and a new (old) NTSC Dreamcast is winging its way to me! After a few evenings of tinkering I managed to get this running in lxdream:

Unfortunately, despite the Dreamcast being fantastically more capable on paper (200MHz CPU, 16MB RAM, 8MB VRAM vs the DS’ 66MHz CPU, 4MB RAM and 656KB VRAM), it turns out that in terms of raw CPU performance there’s not a whole lot between them. On a more positive note, programming the Dreamcast looks like it’ll be fun, so once this refactoring project is complete I think I’ll try writing something exclusively for it.